Signaling challenges of today's smart phone driven services will persist and evolve as wireless networks transition to LTE. LTE offers some hope of signaling reduction with radio optimization and changes in mobility management that should reduce signaling. For example, LTE has several differences that will drive more signaling potentially at a rapid pace. Key among these includes changes that enable richer services including IP multimedia subsystem support that will drive new types of business apps and services. These new services are only possible on LTE due to the combination of faster network speeds and Smartphone computing power; however, they also will lead to more signaling.
LTE networks are not a panacea for signaling issues. Part of that consideration should be traffic optimization, which can ameliorate signaling that comes from applications and from the network and optimizing traffic for resource conservation. In principle, public IP networks are always routable within the Internet, so requests to/from public networks can always be optimized. An exception to this is requests to public IP addresses using unsupported protocols or ports. Private networks (that is, networks in one of the private IP spaces as can be defined by, for example, RFC 1918: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16), are connected to the public Internet via a gateway and are not routable from external hosts.